Alan Murchison - The Cycling Chef: Recipes for Performance and Pleasure

French cyclist Andre Darrigade grabs a musette at high speed during the 1956 Tour de France. He was awarded that years Combativity Award and held the yellow jersey during six stages.

Introduction

Cycling and food are the twin passions of my life. In Performance Chef, the business I set up in 2016 to provide meal planning, recovery strategies and race fuelling advice to elite athletes, Im able to combine my experience as a Michelin-starred restaurant chef with a first-hand knowledge of elite sport. The guiding philosophy of Performance Chef is that nutrition is not only an integral part of any athletes planning and preparation, but also that food should satisfy the appetite and the taste buds: food that is both for pleasure and for performance.

This book gives me the opportunity to expound upon that philosophy and provide recipes that any aspiring high-performance cyclist can follow.

Im in the fortunate position of working with cyclists of all abilities, from Olympic champions, Commonwealth medallists and World Tour riders to those who are entering their first sportive, and one constant I see on a daily basis is that the quality of the food they eat and a well-balanced diet are key to their improvement, recovery and general good health.

Athletes want and need to eat well to maximise their performance. However, the majority of professional or elite cyclists are training so hard that there is nothing they want to do less than spend hours in a kitchen slaving over a stove. Similarly, recreational cyclists of all abilities have limited time during the day to deal with training, work, kids, family and general living, let alone mastering complicated nutritional information. Post-ride, no cyclist ever stands in a supermarket in their bib shorts, working out the macronutrients of the food they have thrown into their shopping trolley. They want to eat, they want to train and they want to feed themselves as best they can with the limited inclination, time, knowledge or money they have at their disposal, and thats where this book can help.

If youre not training or racing as well as you had envisaged then its probably down to over- or under-training (if you use a platform like TrainingPeaks [www.trainingpeaks.com] or are coached well, this is pretty unlikely); not recovering properly; or under- or over-fuelling. Training load must be matched with appropriate fuelling, so your food requirements will vary considerably from day to day and from month to month depending on how much you are doing.

One constant I see on a daily basis is that the quality of the food they eat and a well-balanced diet are key to their improvement, recovery and general good health.

Your daily intake will depend on your training and race schedule. You dont need a 5000-calorie day when youre doing a 60-minute recovery ride any more than you can get by drinking water and eating a green salad with some grilled chicken when youve been out for an honest 100-miler. Hill reps, over-geared work, intervals or race simulation that can cause muscle damage also require high-protein and high-carbohydrate recovery meals to help refuel and repair. This demands some forethought and preparation, particularly if youre fitting your training into a working day.

Once youve accepted the link between fuelling and training and the importance of both to performance, youre halfway there. Your nutritional plans will include a balance of vegetables, grains, meat, pulses and fish, but what and when you eat will depend on your training and racing schedule. Meals can be planned in detail if thats how you roll, but items in the same food groups are often interchangeable according to what you fancy, so red meat can be swapped for chicken, kale for broccoli, kidney beans for aduki beans, etc.

As a chef in top restaurants, Ive learned to have confidence in ingredients, to let food groups stand up for themselves and give meals colour, flavour and texture, but a few key skills and tips can make a real difference to how you approach cooking and eating. It isnt difficult; theres a massive choice of ingredients open to you, all easily obtainable at your local supermarket. Most of the athletes I work with have really rich and varied diets, eating food that helps improve their performance while tasting pretty good.